Our History
Early Roots * Forming a Nonprofit Organization * Main Categories of our WorkThe Rebuilding Alliance is the evolution of a citizen response to the bulldozing of ___ Palestinian homes in Jenin, Palestine by the Israeli Army in April, 2002. But for expressing alarm and concern, the world could not stop that destruction – but we, as a small group of activists and social entrepreneurs, knew how to support Palestinians and Israelis who were willing to work together to rebuild demolished Palestinian homes.
Early Roots
In June 2002, three nongovernmental organizations – the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (www.ICAHD.org), the Jerusalem Center for Social and Economic Rights (www.JCSER.org), and Just Peace Technologies – formed the Global Campaign to Rebuild Palestinian Homes. GlobalExchange.org provided fiscal sponsorship for the Campaign and the foundation for Middle East Peace provided a small planning grant. When seed-grant funding proved unavailable, the Just Peace Technologies team personally ran up their credit cards and lent their time to launch the Global Campaign, much as one might launch a first film.The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, a coalition of Israeli peace and justice groups, had pioneered the idea of rebuilding demolished Palestinian homes with the rebuilding of the Shawamreh home some five years earlier. Our Global Campaign gave people around the world the opportunity to help.
Our Global Campaign set a goal of raising $1m to rebuild 30 homes in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza. Israeli activist and filmmaker Amir Terkel made a short film called “Right to a Home and a Homeland”, and over 160 people hosted house party fundraisers. We brought ICAHD coordinator Jeff Halper (recently nominated for a Nobel Prize along with Ghassan Andoni!), Salim and Arabiya Shawamreh (whose home was demolished four times) to speak in the U.S. In total we rebuilt six homes, and a peace center in the Jerusalem area, a kindergarten in the West Bank, and also raised the funds needed to petition the Israeli Supreme Court to stop specific demolitions.
One of our most noteworthy projects at this time was the 5th rebuilding of the Shawamreh Family′s home. Our Global Campaign raised the funding for this from 400 United Methodist churches in Minnesota, and nearly a hundred people came to help with the rebuilding of this home. Muralist Mike Alewitz painted a mural in honor of Rachel Corrie and Nuha Suidan, and hundreds came for the opening ceremony. When demolition orders threatened the home for the 5th time, the Minnesota Methodists led the way in appealing to their congress people to help save their home – it remains standing now, as a peace center.
Opening Ceremony of the Beit Arabiya Peace Center, August 21, 2003.
Muralist Mike Alewitz at center.
When we received a $10,000 grant from the Oxford Foundation, they asked us to use the funds to rebuild a school that would not be demolished. We learned of the village of Al Aqabah, near Tajassir (south of Jenin), where the Israeli Supreme Court had required the Israeli Army to cease training activities in the village and demolish its own training camp. It took over six months to get a representative to Al Aqabah because, due to closures and checkpoints, none of our Israeli or Palestinian partners were able to get through. We learned that to rebuild beyond Jerusalem area, we needed new partners, local to those areas and able to work despite ongoing closures. In Al Aqabah, we partnered with the Rural Women′s Association to construct the kindergarten.
About that time, a team of business school students and advisors joined us to find a way to rebuild not just homes, but entire neighborhoods in conflict zones. Our social venture plan, Rebuilding Homes: a Social Venture Plan to Finance and Rebuild Palestinian Neighborhoods, was judged a semifinalist in the National Social Venture Competition sponsored by the Haas Business School at U.C. Berkeley and the Columbia Business School. The United Nations flew us to Geneva to present that plan at a forum on Palestinian reconstruction. In the meantime, David Haskell, then Habitat for Humanity′s Director for the Middle East and Africa, saw our Global Campaign as the most important peacemaking project in the Middle East and flew to San Francisco to meet with us. He stressed the importance of formalizing the Global Campaign into a nonprofit organization so that we could draw support from an increasing pool of donors and foundations.
Meanwhile, ICAHD sought to expand its reputation as a policy thinktank, hosting “Facts on the Ground” for Israeli and international visitors and focusing on a limited number of building projects. JCSER was facing challenges of its own as hundreds of Palestinian families sought legal assistance in fighting the route of the Annexation Wall that would destroy their home or barn, or prevent them from reaching their fields.
We agreed to end the 3way partnership that formed the basis for Global Campaign to Rebuild Palestinian Homes as of October, 2003 and ICAHD signed a letter agreement with the new nonprofit, then called Rebuilding Homes, to set forth the terms of the new relationship going forward. The letter agreement describes how the Campaign′s intellectual property and startup debt would be shared by all parties. At ICAHD′s request, we changed the name of the new nonprofit to the Rebuilding Alliance. Friends of ICAHD now does all the fundraising for ICAHD′s projects and speaking tours.
Forming the Rebuilding Alliance as a Nonprofit Organization
The Rebuilding Alliance was incorporated as a nonprofit on June 28, 2003, just before the presentation before the UN conference in Geneva. The board was formed in May, 2004 and they ratified the bylaws, and hired a bookkeeper consultant and an accounting firm (Brown Adams) to help us setup our accounting system and file for 501c3 status with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. Nonprofit status was granted, retroactive to our 2003 date of incorporation.The board set an immediate goal to launch the Rachel Corrie Rebuilding Campaign in Gaza with the rebuilding of the home of the Nasrallah family, the family whom Rachel Corrie sought to protect when she was killed in Rafah Gaza on March 16, 2003 by the Israeli bulldozer that threatened their home. We also hoped to help the United Nations Relief and Works Agency build the Al Fakhari School – but we learned that an $800,000 school construction project is beyond our current fundraising capacity.
Main Categories of Our Work
Education and Outreach: From the beginning, our Middle East partners have reminded us that to change the unjust policies of the Israeli government – and make the world safer for all of us - we must reach mainstream Americans and our senators and representatives. We provide education, information, and experiences intended to reshape American views of the Middle East.Home Rebuilding: We rebuild homes for Palestinian families whose homes have been unjustly demolished by the Israeli government. The families we work with have never been accused of a security violation – they are victims of a land grab. As much as possible, we rebuild on the homeowner′s land. All projects use local Palestinian contractors and materials, with Israeli and international volunteers assisting where possible.
School Building: Villages and organizations are asking us to help build schools. Despite personal and collective tragedies, they place the education of their children as their highest priority, the key to a better future.
Legal Defense: We select precedent-setting building projects and defend them, all the way up to the Israeli Supreme Court. We solicit amicus curae briefs for pivotal court cases to save homes, schools, and towns from demolition. And the strategy is working! When bulldozers are coming, we can save homes and schools when citizens ask the U.S. Congress to intervene.
